Special flooring systems for indoor and outdoor sports activities, dancing and other like uses have been proposed in the prior art. Among the drawbacks of many prior art floors are their high initial cost, permanency of installation and the fact that they must be made and installed at the flooring site rather than being fabricated and carried to the desired assembly location.
Furthermore, there are many environments and applications where permanent installation of a sports activity type of floor is not dictated or justified. Some locations may require that the sports activity type flooring be removable such that the location is susceptible to utilization for purposes other than sports activities or for a variety of sports activities. Portable sectionalized flooring such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,538,392 have been used to provide this adaptability.
However, floors suitable for sports activities such as volleyball or the like present special problems in requiring post anchors to firmly support posts which in turn support a net. The post anchors should be capable of countering the moment developed by the net through each post so that the vertically upright position of each post remains true.
The problems in meeting these flooring anchor requirements are exacerbated when attempts have been made to associate such anchors with floors in a portable and/or sectionalized form of construction. Prior art attempts to achieve anchor stability require securing an anchor base to the permanent flooring beneath the portable sectionalized flooring system. A further problem is that the anchor base must be aligned with the volleyball center line. Consequently, the prior art installation requires laying portable floor panels after drilling anchor base holes into the permanent subflooring so that the anchor base can be aligned with the volleyball center line of the portable sectionalized flooring. Such a prior art system also calls for building a dummy panel to fit over the installed anchor base to assist in the designing of a sectionalized flooring panel so that the volleyball net post may pass through the sectionalized flooring panel and into the anchor base. Among the drawbacks of such a prior art system are high installation costs, increased set up time, necessary fabrication at the flooring site and difficulty in repositioning the volleyball net since new holes would have to be drilled into the subflooring. Furthermore, where these prior art sectionalized floors must be repeatedly put down and taken up before and after successive sports activities, the separate parts required for the assembly of such volleyball post anchor systems may be easily lost or misplaced while the floor sections are in their disassembled state of non-use or in storage.